Desiree Padilla says to her mother's killer, 'May you live with the guilt of killing my mother for the rest of your miserable life'
"Things have been so hard. I was never able to kiss her goodbye," said Padilla, now 17. "I have no memories of my mother, but I have a place in my heart for her."
Small and slender, with her mother’s dark eyes and generous mouth, Padilla turned tearfully to Steve Fortin, who will spend the rest of his life in prison without any chance for parole.
Speaking on behalf of her two brothers and sister, Desiree looked at Fortin, 45, and said: "May you live with the guilt of killing my mother for the rest of your miserable life."
For the adult members of the Padilla family, the scene Friday was an eerie echo of another courtroom a decade ago. That was when Fortin first stood trial for the Aug. 3, 1994 murder of Melissa Padilla, a 25-year-old woman who was grabbed as she walked along Routes 1 & 9 in Woodbridge carrying a bag of groceries for her four children, then ages 5, 4, 3, and 2.
She was punched so hard she was knocked out of her sandals, then dragged into a large sewer drainage pipe beside the road. She was beaten, sexually assaulted, robbed and strangled. She was bitten on the chin and left breast. Her body was left inside the pipe.
Police had few leads until Fortin — who had a lengthy criminal history including manslaughter and assault — was arrested in 1995 for savagely beating and raping a Maine female trooper during an attempted arrest for drunk driving.
Fortin bit the policewomen on the chin and the left breast. Her bite marks matched the marks found on Padilla.
Fortin was tried in 2000. It was the first time expert testimony on "signature crimes" was allowed in a New Jersey capital murder case. Signature crimes are offenses so similar they form a pattern pointing to a single culprit.
He was convicted and sentenced to death in February 2001, but the case was overturned when the state Supreme Court ruled the trial judge did not adequately question prospective jurors.
During the first and second trials, Padilla’s mother, Carmen Gonzalez bore witness for the family. She sat weeping in the back of the crowded courtroom, although she later said: "I just hope he rots in hell. I’m still angry because he took her away from me, from her children and from her family."
Fortin was convicted again in 2007 and was awaiting the penalty phase to determine if he would die when New Jersey repealed its death penalty law. After years of legal wrangling, a jury earlier this week deliberated briefly before finding that Fortin should be sentenced to life without parole.
Today, sitting next to her husband, Norberto, and Desiree, Carmen Gonzalez again cried as Superior Court Judge James Mulvihill ordered Fortin to serve a life sentence plus another 20 years for sexually assaulting Padilla before she died.
Also sitting in the courtroom was the Maine trooper Fortin savagely beat and raped in 1995. She had no comment.
"On June 21, a jury determined that you should receive life in prison without parole for the unprovoked, savage murder of Melissa Padilla," Mulvihill told Fortin. "This court emphatically agrees with the jury verdict."
Before he was sentenced, Fortin told the judge, "I didn’t kill Melissa Padilla. I didn’t know her. I never saw her before in my life."
Desiree Padilla’s response: "I felt like getting up and beating him up."
She added that as a result of her mother’s murder, "my sister is mentally disabled and my brothers have so much hate for the man who killed their mother that they can’t get over it. I will never get over this."
Yesterday, Middlesex County Assistant Prosecutor Keith Warburton said "people don’t get" why his office persisted in efforts to make certain Fortin served life without any chance of parole.
"They don’t understand that if this murderer ever gets out of prison, someone will die," Warburton said. "And that someone will be a woman. What we do, we do to protect the next victim."
By Sue Epstein and Judy Peet/Star-Ledger Staff